Durability

Many many many people harp on Dell laptops as being piles of shit. I'm here to tell you that they are wrong -- or at least made a poor choice in model.

I bought a Dell Latitude D800 in July 2003. It was my only computer for two years, at which point I switched to a desktop system with the laptop as a portable solution/lab computer. People that have had computer issues all bought Inspirons, which leads me to believe that you should only buy the Latitude if you get a Dell. It is their business, so the idea that it is sturdier makes sense to me.

What has my computer been through? Over 10 cross-country trip in a crammed backpack. It was the computer that drove the MIT DARPA Grand Challenge truck in our 2005 demo video. It was the primary interface for the MIT Campus Tour Bot during its initial design phase.

Okay, you say, that's not a big deal. You carried your laptop around, and it sat on some robots. True enough, but if you've ever seen my laptop when it is driving the robot, you would understand that its continued existence is something of a marvel. When on the robot, the laptop bounces around like crazy -- little bounces, maybe 1/2" - 1" -- and repeatedly. It is a constant barrage. Looking at the case to my laptop, with all the dents and dings, and you'll know it has been through hell. The real kicker, though, is two weeks ago, while driving the robot, I stepped on the joystick cord and my laptop flew off the robot into a tailspin and crashed onto the sidewalk -- this is a fall of about two feet with a robot moving about 1.5 meters/sec. When I tried to turn the laptop on, it fired up, but there was a clicking. I assumed it was the hard drive. I had bought a new hard drive in 2005 to increase storage capacity (the old was fine, I just needed more than 40 gigs for a dual-boot system), so I planned on just putting the old one in. Well, when I went to make the switch, I discovered that, amazingly, my hard drive was working perfectly. The clicking was coming from the CD-Rom drive, which is what hit first on the ground I think. Mind you, this laptop is before the time when there were accelerometers installed on the hard drives, so there was data access happening at the time.

Needless to say, through all of this my laptop still lives, minus a CD-Rom drive that I don't really use. With that, I plan on sticking with Dell when the time comes for another laptop. I'd recommend the same to you.